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Introduction

Addiction in (Early) Modernity

The scholarship on addiction is vast and capacious. So, too, are the critical bibliographies on early modern faith, love, and drinking. This book, which is indebted to these large fields, charts a path directly between them, clearing the way to a previously obscured area: early modern addiction.¹ This area has remained largely invisible for two reasons. First, critical discourses on addiction tend to emphasize the concept’s modernity, as this introduction’s opening section reveals. Second, the scholarship on early modern devotion, love, friendship, and drinking—the addictions charted in this project—attends to a wealth of historical evidence beyond what might appear the philological curiosity of addiction’s appearance. The study of early modern addiction thus brings together what are otherwise distinct scholarly approaches to the study of modern addiction on the one hand and to early modern practices of faith, love, and good fellowship on the other.

Addiction and Modernity

In her essay “Epidemics of the Will,” Eve Sedgwick explores addiction precisely as a feature of modernity. Just as Michel Foucault theorizes how same-sex acts preceded the formation, in the nineteenth century, of the identity of the homosexual, so too with the addict. First came the acts—the drinking, the smoking, and the gambling—then came the character designation of the addict. As Sedgwick writes, “In the taxonomic reframing of a drug user as an addict, what changes are the most basic terms about her. From a situation of relative homeostatic stability and control, she is propelled into a narrative of inexorable decline and fatality,” being given “a newly pathologized addict identity.”² Sedgwick’s distinction between acts and identity hinges on the opposition of what she calls the “stability and control” evident in willful choice—the individual who chooses to drink—and the tyranny of compulsion—the “pathologized” addict, who is compelled to consume.

Current addiction research asserts, and at times attempts to theorize, this pathologized identity of the addict. Debates on addiction as choice, predisposition, dependency, and disease move between the poles of free will and undermined agency.³ Jeffrey Poland and George Graham write, for example, of a “toxic first-person self-pathologizing” that may in fact “undermine a person’s efforts to overcome her problems.”⁴ Their study of addiction and responsibility emphasizes instead the degree of agentive selfhood exercised by addicts, and more broadly, their edited collection features a range of essays on addiction, free will, and choice. Such agency appears compromised, however, to many other addiction researchers. Lubomira Radoilska argues, for example, that “addiction-centered agency is paradoxical by its very nature. For it is eccentric in a self-defeating way: agential control is surrendered in search of a greater, though impossible, control. As a result, a form of passivity or dependence is placed at the heart of an addict’s activities.”⁵ Such passivity or dependence appears, in Radoilska’s formulation, as a form of “defeat in action.”⁶ With diametrically opposed approaches to addiction and agency, theorists struggle to formulate policy in dealing with a perceived health crisis.

“The field of addiction is not short on theories,” the authors of The Theory of Addiction write: “There are psychological theories, biological theories, sociological theories, economic theories, biopsychosocial theories and more.”⁷ But the field is arguably short on history. In fact, much of the effort to understand addiction in a modern setting overlooks or radically shortens its history, approaching addiction as if it were a universal or modern phenomenon. This project, while influenced by the range of recent studies, particularly within the philosophy of addiction and the history of science, nevertheless takes a different approach. It uncovers both a longer history of views on addiction and an alternate understanding of addiction as an achievement.

Conventional medical history on addiction dates the concept to the turn of the nineteenth century, when physicians in both Britain and America diagnosed alcoholism as a nervous disorder; no concept of addiction, it is claimed, existed in England or America before this period. Advances in medical science and psychology led to its definition in both countries. First, the British navy physician Thomas Trotter, who has been called “the first scientific investigator of drunkenness,” produced a 1788 Edinburgh doctoral thesis arguing that habitual drunkenness is itself a disease.⁸ His dissertation was published in 1804 as An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness, and Its Effects on the Human Body, and in it Trotter notes, “In medical language, I consider drunkenness, strictly speaking, to be a disease.”⁹ This disease manifests in illnesses attendant on overdrinking, including “universal debility, emaciation, loss of intellect, palsy, dropsy, dyspepsia, hepatic diseases, and all others which flow from the indulgence of spirituous liquors.”¹⁰ Nearly simultaneously, Benjamin Rush in America (one of the original signatories of the Declaration of Independence and a man deemed the founder of American psychiatry) published An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind (1785), in which he also defines drunkenness as a disease: “Drunkenness resembles certain hereditary, family and contagious diseases.”¹¹ Rush’s work theorizes the trajectory from choice to compulsion: “The use of strong drink is at first the effect of free agency. From habit it takes place from necessity. That this is the case, I can infer from persons who are inordinately devoted to the use of ardent spirits being irreclaimable, by all the considerations which domestic obligations, friendship, reputation, property, and sometimes even by those which religion and love of life, can suggest to them.”¹² As with Trotter, he names the diseases stemming from drunkenness, including jaundice, dropsy, epilepsy, gout, and madness.

The work of Trotter and Rush ushered in a “new paradigm,” as the medical sociologist Harry G. Levine writes. This new paradigm “constituted a radical break with traditional ideas about the problems involved in drinking and alcohol.”¹³ Specifically, opinion shifted on habitual drunkenness (and in turn on opium use and other addictive behaviors) to a disease model, the key feature of modern definitions of addiction. As the historian of science Roy MacLeod notes: “It was too easy to view alcoholism simply as immoral excess, its cure, simple moral restraint, and its expense, a personal responsibility.”¹⁴ As a result, he writes, “the transformation of public attitudes from the conception of alcoholism as a moral sin to its recognition as a nervous disease required concerted effort.”¹⁵ In understanding the shift in viewpoint on excessive drinking, scholars not only stress the moralizing of earlier periods, as MacLeod does here, but they also point to earlier conceptions of drinking as a matter of choice. Levine, for example, discusses how “during the 17th century, and for the most part of the 18th, the assumption was that people drank and got drunk because they wanted to, and not because they ‘had’ to.”¹⁶ He elaborates: “In the modern definition of alcoholism, the problem is not that alcoholics love to get drunk, but that they cannot help it—they cannot control themselves.”¹⁷

This paradigm shift in the study of addiction is of a piece with other scientific discoveries of the period, Roy Porter argues: “Building to some degree on the work of precursors such as Erasmus Darwin, nineteenth century doctors set about investigating the pathology of excessive drinking, exploring its associations with conditions such as dropsy, heart disease, cirrhosis of the liver, … nervous disorders, paralyses.”¹⁸ MacLeod also recognizes this new nineteenth-century paradigm and charts the general impact of this breakthrough over the course of the century:

Not until the last half of the 19th century did the scientific appreciation of alcoholism become general. Only then, under the guidance of a few doctors and reformers, was the image of the drunkard as a disorderly, ill-disposed social unit gradually transformed into one of a neglected patient suffering from a mental disease with well-marked clinical features. Reformers, who sought to remove the moral stigma from alcoholism and to treat the alcoholic by medical means, led the advance guard of a movement to promote prevention and cure on a public basis.¹⁹

As part of these reform movements, the first temperance societies appeared in England in the 1830s, and Parliament passed the landmark Habitual Drunkards Act in 1879. That legislation is, in terms of this addiction narrative, the culmination of efforts by physicians and reformers who shifted the notion of inebriation from social condemnation to scientific understanding. In doing so, they redefined a habitual drunkard from a sinner to someone with a disease akin to lunacy.²⁰

More-recent historians have put pressure on the pioneering nature of Trotter and Rush’s conclusions. The research of both Porter and Jessica Warner on the eighteenth-century gin craze exposes a notion of diseased drinking in the century before Trotter and Rush.²¹ The work of Phil Withington and others on intoxication tracks the “modern obsession” with substance abuse, even as it illuminates how contemporary concerns about intoxication have “enduring roots in the past.”²² Yet even though the dating of addiction might vary, and even as historians illuminate the long history of intoxication, a broad consensus remains that addiction constitutes a modern discovery, one connected intimately to familiar features of modernity: the rise of Enlightenment individualism, medicalization, global trade, nation states, and capitalism.²³ Current advances in neurobiological research further reinforce the link of addiction to modernity by suggesting how addiction’s discovery is ongoing and dependent upon modern technologies: using newly available scanning devices, such as PETs and fMRIs, to trace precisely how the addicted brain operates, neuroscientists have exposed the long-lasting changes in brain function caused by addiction, including “the pathological usurpation” of the brain’s reward-circuit learning.²⁴ As a result of such usurpation, the rewired, addicted brain releases dopamine in response to the anticipation of drug taking, rather than merely as a result of drug ingestion.²⁵

Finally, literary histories have underscored addiction’s modernity by studying the emergence, in the late eighteenth century, of the inspired writer-addict. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey stand as early examples of addict-writers, with Coleridge linking literary inspiration and drug consumption in his famous preface to “Kubla Khan.” From the Romantic’s tincture of opium through Eugene O’Neill’s and Tennessee Williams’s alcoholism to Jim Morrison’s acid trips and William Burroughs’s heroin addiction, writers offer autobiographical chronicles of how drug addiction might fuel or fell creativity. The addict-writer holds a clear place in the imaginative landscape of the twentieth century, articulating what seems to be a particularly modern, or postmodern, condition of stasis and excess.²⁶ “Addiction,” as Janet Ferrell Brodie and Marc Redfield write, “belongs as a concept to the social and technical regimes of the modern era.”²⁷ Their cultural history draws attention to the ideological ramifications of addiction, a concept that is “little more than a century old.”²⁸ Chronicling drug abuse, Stacey Margolis calls addiction “a particularly modern form of desire.”²⁹ Anna Alexander and Mark S. Roberts argue that “addiction emerges directly alongside modernity,” and Jacques Derrida speaks of our “narcotic modernity.”³⁰ These accounts draw on the perception of the modern bodies as uniquely pathologized and incapacitated, precisely as Sedgwick illuminates. Specifically, the modern subject, imbricated in a global economy, finds addiction at once an expression of powerlessness and pleasure.

Yet even as modern medical and psychological research illuminates the workings of addiction in entirely new ways, and even as writers from Coleridge onward experience addiction more acutely than in the past, addiction is not a singular feature of modernity. As this introduction’s final section reveals, a model of addiction as compulsion and disease existed earlier than the nineteenth century. Overturning the notion that addiction was “discovered” only a century ago, or even two or three centuries ago, this project demonstrates an early modern awareness of alcohol addiction as a disease along the lines charted by medical pioneers and modern-day neurobiologists: addiction alters the brain and results in a familiar, and oft-repeated, set of related diseases. To imagine that the premodern period remains entirely distinct from modernity when it comes to addiction is to overlook the rich evidence from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that suggests the awareness of addiction as a disease.

Further, and perhaps more important, the insistent yoking of addiction, disease, and modernity has allowed us to ignore what is arguably the more compelling half of the addiction story, which becomes evident through study of early modern writings: addiction represents a singular form of commitment and devotion, worthy of admiration as much as censure.

Addiction as Devotion

One of the early examples of the term “addiction” comes, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, from a line in Shakespeare’s Othello: in celebrating a military victory, the play’s Herald tells the soldiers “each man to what sport and revels his addiction leads him” (2.2.5–6).³¹ In other words, each man can choose to follow whatever activities he pleases. Yet the term “addiction” is deployed widely before this Othello reference, and the play’s engagement with theories of addiction—as Chapter 4 will discuss at length—is more complex than the lexicographical gloss credits. Addiction is not, it turns out, mere inclination.

Invocations of addiction begin to cluster in printed texts from the 1530s, as in the work of George Joye, who produced the first printed translation of several books of the Old Testament. The prophete Isaye, translated into englysshe (1531) offers one of the earliest usages of the term, in a context entirely familiar to modern readers. Joye warns, “Wo be to the haunters of dronkenes which ryse erly to drinke, continuinge in it tyl nighte being hot with wyne: in whose bankets there are harpes and futes taberet & pype washed with wyne.”³² These “haunters of dronkenes” will suffer divine retribution: “The helles haue opened their unsaciable throtes and their mouthes gape beyende mesure that thither mought descende pryde, pompe, riches and al that are addicte to these vices.”³³ Joye’s warnings at once recall the familiar medieval and early modern schema of the seven deadly sins and predict the century’s broader legislative and conceptual interest in pathological addiction.

While the invocation of drinkers, “addicte to these vices,” anticipates both the modern definitions of “addiction” in relation to substances and the railings of puritans who attack drunkenness, Joye uses the term more expansively as well. In The Psalter of Dauid in Englyshe (1534), he warns of mortal men “addict to this worlde” and against the ungodly who are “addycte unto wyckedness,” and “addicte and all giuen to wickedness.”³⁴ He also praises the faithful follower of God as an addict, asking God to “make faste thy promyses to thy servant which is addicte unto thy worshyppe.”³⁵ Further, in The Unitie and Scisme of the Olde Chirche, Joye insists on the unity Jesus preached, with the faithful “addict unto none but to christ.” He writes Jesus hoped that his apostles “thorow love might consent and godly agree being all one thinge in christe, and that there be no dissencions nor sectis in his chirch unto no creatures being addict unto none but to christe hir spouse dedicatinge hirself.”³⁶

This range of the term’s appearance—to signify excessive drunkenness, inclination to wickedness, overattachment to worldly pleasure, as well as devotion to God and Scripture—suggests its broad association with forms of attachment. Furthermore, the term’s appearance in early translations of the Bible and polemics surrounding the Reformed faith indicates its link to religious controversy. Specifically, in the context of post-Reformation England, the term appears most frequently to describe one kind of dedication: to God and the church. In the wake of theological debates following Henry VIII’s break from Rome, addiction becomes a sign of study, commitment, and piety, as well as a signal of false attachment to, and dangerous tyranny of, the Pope or Antichrist. Thus, in the 1540s the term appears repeatedly in church histories by writers such as John Bale, Polydore Vergil, and Thomas Becon. Bale, for example, writes of those “addict to their supersticyons,” and specifically those “Antichristes addict to the supersticiouse rytes of the heythens in their sacrifices, their ceremonies, their observations, their holy dayes, theyr vygils, fastinges, praynges, knelinges & all other usages contrary to the admonyshement of Christ.”³⁷ Here addiction signals an attachment to material aids to worship, which were associated with the Roman church. Vergil, too, condemns those “wholy addict to the honoryng of their false goddess,” while praising those “men of the laye sort geven and addicted to praiers.”³⁸ The answer, as Philip Nicolls counsels his readers, is to “addict youre selves to the meaneynge of the scripture.”³⁹

Reformed writings overtly celebrate addiction as an intense mode of devotion and commitment, even as they express concern for misguided addictions to the improper faith. Following the etymology of “addiction” as ad + dīcere (to speak, to declare), these writings trumpet a model of addictive living that is at once an invitation and a prescription. The Elizabethan “An Homilee of good workes” (1571), for example, encourages addicting oneself to prayer as a means of pleasing God. Those who “did eyther earnestlye lament and bewayle their sinfull lyues, or did addict them selves to more fervent prayer” learn that “it might please God to turne his wrath from them.”⁴⁰ Such positive invocations of addiction also fill those guides encouraging modes of pious living, as Humphrey Gifford writes in A posie of gilloflowers (1580). In his “Farewell Court” of poems, he counsels his readers to “cast away the vile and vaine vanities that the wicked world accounteth as precious, and addict all their doings towards the attainement of lyfe euerlasting.”⁴¹ Barnabe Googe encourages, in his translation of Marcello Palingenio Stellato’s Zodiac (1565), the addict to dedicate himself specifically to prayer: “The mind wel purgde of naughty thoughtes, / in fervent sprite to praye: / And wholly to addict himselfe / the heavenly state to finde / And all the cares that fleshe doth give, / to banishe from his minde.”⁴²

Even as these guides to pious living encourage addiction, at the same time writers acknowledge its difficulty. Not just anyone can achieve it. The popular text Of the Imitation of Christ (1580) encourages parishioners toward addiction, for example: “Learne to contemne outwarde things and to addict thy selfe to spiritual; so shalt thou perceave the kingdome of God to come into thee.” Nevertheless, the author concedes the challenge of this charge, writing how “fewe there be which addict themselves to the studie of celestial things, because fewe can withdrawe themselves, wholie from the love of this world.”⁴³ In The glory of their times (1640), Donald Lupton acknowledges the struggle by pondering Christ’s fortitude in pursuing addiction: “How did hee addict himselfe to watching, fasting, prayer, and Meditation?”⁴⁴

The historian Raphael Holinshed, in his Chronicles (1577), draws upon the language of these pious writers, a migration from religious to secular texts that speaks to the scope of addiction’s invocations. Holinshed praises those devout, spiritual leaders who are capable of addiction, writing of “the reverende Fathers of the spiritualtie, and other godly men addict to vertue, unto whome the setting forth of Gods worde hath beene committed.”⁴⁵ More specifically, he praises King Edward the Elder as “in his latter dayes beeying greatly addicted to devotion and religious priests.”⁴⁶ In A direction for the health of Magistrates and Studentes, the reader similarly learns the value of addicted leaders, for the virtuous ruler must “ernestly addicte himself to the studie of Morall Philosophie and of the sacred Scriptures.”⁴⁷ These secular texts adopt a language of devotional addiction as a means of educating readers on the attributes of good rulership.

Addiction requires a natural disposition and ability; it is not purely a matter of hard work or instruction. As John Huarte writes in The examination of mens wits (1594), if a “child have not the disposition and abilitie, which is requisit for that science whervnto he wil addict himselfe, it is a superfluous labour to be instructed therein by good schoolemaisters.”⁴⁸ Therefore, even as religious prescriptions follow the etymological invitation of addiction as a mode of speech or a form of command that they offer to their pious readers, these writers also understand addiction as an inclination that the individual both does and does not control. Their readers might attempt the form of addictive devotion counseled in the texts, but as theologians expound—most prominently Jean Calvin, as Chapter 1 discusses in detail—addiction is also perceived as a form of grace. Lancelot Andrews states how only by “being so visited, redeemed and saved, we might wholy addict, and give over our selves, to the Service of Him who was Author of them all.”⁴⁹ Roger Edgeworth, too, invokes election and addiction, writing how only certain men are chosen for priests: “Election and imposition of a prelates hande,” a future priest “is piked out & chosen among the moe to be addict and appoynted to God, and to be a minister of God in the Churche or congregation.”⁵⁰ The ability to addict is both a gift and an effort. For William Baldwin it requires following in Christ’s footsteps:

Wherwith although I be afflict,

In wurth I take all lovyngly:

Beyng for Christes sake addict

To suffre al paynes wyllyngly,

Continually.⁵¹

Baldwin’s metered rendition of the Psalms, like Sternhold and Hopkins’ Booke of Psalms, engages a broadly pious audience. As hymns that might commonly appear in church, these psalms offer one way in which the language of addiction-as-devotion appeared in everyday life, independent of study of Reformation theology. Addiction was at once intoned in the church and echoed in the streets.

Finally, addiction is a form of service, as emphasized in the English College of Douai’s translation of the book of Psalms, which offers “a general and very fitte prayer, when we addict ourselves by a firme resolution to serve God.” Further, the speaker protests that “even by the mortal hate of the wicked I saw, that Gods law is most excellent, and therefore addicted myself so much the more to lone [love] it and to hate al wicked ways.”⁵² Thomas Taylor’s parable of the sower and the seed similarly counsels that the faithful say “in their hearts, Thus much wealth I will attaine unto, and when I have done that, I will addict my selfe to the service of God.”⁵³ Paul, in his letter to Titus, impresses upon his audience the value of addicted service, at least in Erasmus’s version of the text. The epistle begins with lines in which Paul casts himself as an addict: “I Paule my selfe the addict servant & obeyer, not of Moses lawe as I was once, but of God the father, and ambassador of his sonne Jesus Christ.”⁵⁴

For most of the sixteenth century, addiction, in its link to God and service, was not a problem; it was an achievement. To be an addict indicated commitment, vulnerability, hard work, and courage. To be an addict meant to devote oneself entirely to a calling—to be addicted to scripture, to scholarship more generally, or to Christ. Nevertheless, in its derided invocations, such addiction might signal enthrallment, the relinquishment of good sense and true faith: one might be addicted to the pope or superstitious practices, or one might, as Joye suggests, be addicted to alcohol. Thus addiction appeared both laudable and dangerous, a commitment to salvation or degeneration. Furthermore, the term “addict” contains at once a sense of obligation (as in its Latin origin, in contract law), as well as a sense of choice (to bequeath or give). These alternate, competing, but connected senses of addiction—as compulsion and choice, as the right path or the reprobate one—resonate with the philosophical and theological questioning familiar to readers of Reformation literatures: what is the role of free will in faith? If the godly seek to will away the will, hoping to receive grace, addiction encapsulates this struggle in the desire to give oneself over to a higher power. The struggle remains, ultimately, an active, unresolved one, because the concept of addiction leaves profoundly unsettled this question of devotional agency: the addict might will himself or herself toward God; equally, however, as the voluminous literature on pious living suggests, an earthly authority might attempt to command or dictate (dicare) such dedication, or God might offer it through grace.

Addiction as Abuse

The profound uncertainty surrounding both the agent propelling addictive devotion (be it the believer or an external authority) and the object of devotion itself (the godly or heretical path) invites wary understandings of addiction’s power. Thus, in addition to the view of addiction as an extraordinary form of commitment, sixteenth-century religious polemics warn against the dangers of fervent attachment to the wrong object. Such warnings take the form of cautions against idolatry and of a more general fear of material forms of worship associated with Catholicism. Thomas Bilson, writing in support of the English church, claims that Catholic “writers were all addicted to images,” while William Charke criticizes the “willful addiction to the olde translation” of the Bible.⁵⁵

The investigation of errant addiction is particularly evident in the works of John Foxe, who derides those who “addict themselves so devoutly to ye popes learning,” singling out individual stories of those “worshipping of Idoles” to which they are “addict.”⁵⁶ Depicting the adoration of icons as a kind of addiction, Foxe writes, as in the case of the Catholic Lord Cobham: “If any man do otherwise abuse this representation, and geve the reverence unto those Images, which is due unto the holy men whom they represent … or if they be so affected toward the domb Images, that they do in any behalfe addict unto them, eyther be more addicted unto one Saint then another, in my minde they doe little differ from Idolatrye, grievously offending agaynst God the author of all honor.”⁵⁷ Foxe links addiction and abuse here, deriding those believers who mistakenly “abuse” representations and “addict” themselves to “domb images” or “one Saint then another.” Such a form of addiction is a grievous offense, for it establishes a deep but improper commitment to idols over God.

The Reformers’ concern with addiction to physical forms of worship connects to their suspicion of addiction to physical pleasures more broadly. The Elizabethan “An Homilee agaynst gluttony and drunkenness,” for example, directly links improper forms of worship and gluttony: “Neyther woulde we at this day be so addict to superstition, were it not that we so much esteemed the fillyng of our bellies.”⁵⁸ Such a concern for idolatry and appetite appears from the inception of reformist movements in England. Henry VIII writes in A glasse of the truthe against those worshipers exhibiting “a great lacke of grace, and an overmoche addiction to pryuate appetites.”⁵⁹ Attachment to physical pleasures produces, these authorities speculate, misguided religious faith, or vice versa.

The suspicion of material devotion expands from the attacks on papal dictates, iconography, and other earthly aids to worship into the preoccupation with addictive worldly lures. And in the process, puritan railers condemn lust, gaming, tobacco taking, stage plays, and any number of other material pleasures. Early modern historians have called this phenomenon the Puritan Reformation of Manners, because “pious pleadings” in the 1580s led, by the seventeenth century, to what Keith Wrightson has deemed “a programme of national significance,” regulating behavior from tavern haunting to May games.⁶⁰ “Scores of pamphlets and printed sermons,” Martin Ingram concurs, gesture toward “a ‘national’ movement,” one that is innovative in its reach: “Save for preaching from the pulpit and the circulation of statutes, proclamations and town ordinances,” he writes, “there was no late fifteenth-century equivalent.”⁶¹ This reformation of manners had a dramatic legislative and administrative impact on the early modern landscape, an impact achieved largely by the vehemence of the reformers and their “narrowness of concern.”⁶² The legislative effect was particularly felt in the arena of drunkenness, which was increasingly perceived as a national problem. Beyond tavern regulation, early modern legislators developed laws against drunkenness itself, following the decade of puritan attacks on drinking and tavern haunting. As A. Lynn Martin puts it, “If the moralists are to be believed, drunkenness reached plague proportions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in England.”⁶³ Indeed, the early modern period saw the passage of England’s first national law against drunkenness itself, after a forty-year parliamentary battle. The “modern” discovery of addiction and the resulting legal regulation with the 1879 Habitual Drunkards Act (discussed above) was in fact mirrored centuries earlier with the 1606 Statute Against Drunkenness.

Concerns about drunkenness have, of course, a long history, extending from classical literature forward.⁶⁴ From Beowulf to Langland, medieval writers chronicle drinking rituals and abuse. The English abbot and homilist Aelfric of Eynsham, anticipating later puritan detractors, cautions that “drunkenness is a vice of such magnitude that … drunkards are not able to obtain the kingdom of God.”⁶⁵ And The Trinity Homilies compare the gluttonous man to a swine in language resonant with early modern descriptions: “Some men pass their lives in eating and drinking, as swine, which foul themselves, and root up and sniff ever foully.”⁶⁶ Yet even as medieval examinations of drinking accord with early modern discussions on drunkenness as beastly, ungodly, and dangerous, their framework differs notably, frequently hinging on the language of the seven deadly sins and the eight sins before them.⁶⁷ The deadly sin of gluttony—with attendant drunkenness—attracted special attention as a gateway sin, a point Chaucer’s Parson makes clear in The Canterbury Tales: those guilty of gluttony, as he puts it, “may no synne withstonde.”⁶⁸ From the character of Gluttony in medieval dramas such as The Castle of Perseverance to Langland’s extended tavern portrait in Piers Plowman to the Parson’s and Pardoner’s tales about the seven deadly sins in Chaucer, the warnings against drunkenness are often predictable: the drinker fails to attend church, saps family’s finances, endangers health, and commits other sins as a result of being drunk.⁶⁹

As powerful as this medieval framework of the deadly sins might be, by the sixteenth century writings on drunkenness shift away from the schema to a more pointed view of drunkenness as disease and reprobation.⁷⁰ From Shephard’s attack on Catholic curates in “Doctor Double Ale” to Skelton’s infamous misogyny in “The Tunning of Elynour Rumming,” allegations against drinkers offer satirical portraits of corruption and hypocrisy.⁷¹ What had been deemed errancy and sin, in need of salvation and forgiveness, is increasingly figured as compulsion, the inability to shift away from drinking. To John Downame, as for other puritan writers, those who “addict themselves to much drinking” prompt a spiritual, economic, and legal crisis.⁷² William Perkins thus warns his allies “not to addict ourselves to drinking,” while William Prynne chidingly writes, “The people given to idlenesse and vaine discourse doe in these dayes addict themselves more to drunkennesse, surfetting, Playes and wantonnesse, than to divine things.”⁷³ Writers bolster their arguments with medical diagnoses, anticipating the modern notion of addiction as compulsive, pathological attachment. Texts such as The Drunkards Cup, Diet for a Drunkard, The Drunkard’s Character, and The Condition of a Drunkard speak of drunkenness as a physical disease and as a defining identity much earlier than current narratives on the rise of “modern” addiction suggest.⁷⁴

Downame elaborates on the two ways that drinkers abuse themselves: “First by drunkenness, when by immoderate swilling and tipling they are deprived of the use of their reason, understanding, and memory; so as for the time, they become like unto beasts. Second, by excesse, when as they addict themselves to much drinking, and make it their usual practice to sit at the wine or strong drink.”⁷⁵ While “drunkenness” and “excess” might seem synonymous to modern audiences, for Downame they are distinct. “Drunkenness” describes the phenomenon of overdrinking, regardless of how often—drunkenness produces, he says, substance-related problems (deprivation of “reason, understanding, and memory”). “Excess” denotes habitual overdrinking or compulsive use (a “usual practice” of excess, as men “sit at the wine or strong drink”). Thus, both singular drunkenness and habitual drinking are part of the dangers of alcohol. Addiction appears, Downame claims, when the drinker can no longer abstain: “They who addict themselves to this vice, doe finde it so sweet and pleasing to the flesh, that they are loath to part with it.”⁷⁶

Downame’s concern for those addicts of alcohol stands in contrast to the widespread Galenic prescription of alcohol in promoting good health.⁷⁷ Alcohol’s role in that regard was especially crucial since daily beverages such as beer and ale provided both clean water and calories to their consumers. Indeed, as Louise Hill Curth and Tanya M. Cassidy write, “Alcohol, consumed in moderation, was thought to be an important ally in the fight against disease. Ale, beer, and wine were all touted for their preservative properties.”⁷⁸ Excessive and habitual drunkenness challenged the Galenic prescriptions for self care and provoked increasing concern from medical, legal, and religious authorities, prompting examination, as Jennifer Richards illuminates, of precisely what constituted “enough.”⁷⁹ This concern is expressed not only in sermonizing writings but also in historical chronicles such as Holinshed’s, where he notes the role of beer in the English diet and the resulting “ale knightes so much addicted thereunto, that they will not cease from morow untyll even.”⁸⁰

Addicted drinkers suffer, many writers argue, from disease. The daily bouts affect the drinkers’ brains, leading to greater toleration for alcohol. John Hoskins, in concert with his contemporaries, describes how wine gives “the braine a blow, that like a subtil wrastler, it may supplant the feet afterwards.”⁸¹ While these authors had none of the modern tools, such as brain-scan technology, that are available to twenty-first-century neurobiologists, they nevertheless anticipate modern research in their preoccupation with the drunken brain, as well as the drunken body. Further, these writers catalogue a set of diseases familiar to modern researchers and chronicled in Trotter and Rush’s work, cited above. The drinker, Downame and other critics of drunkenness argue, “is brought unto grievous diseases, as dropsies, gouts, palsies, apoplexie, and such like.”⁸² This catalogue of diseases appears in nearly all discussions of drunkenness in this genre of religious polemic.⁸³ Drunkenness leads to such “diseases in the body of man, as apoplexies, falling sicknesses, palsies, dropsies, consumptions, giddinesse of the head, inflammation of the blood and liver, distemper of the brain, deprivation of the sense, and whatnot,” as the anonymous author of A looking glasse for drunkards (1627) writes.⁸⁴

Of course, this language of disease does not indicate that early modern notions of diseased alcoholism map easily onto modern ones. To early modern writers, drunkenness is also a sign of errancy, not least because, as Roy Porter argues, “sickness was largely seen as personal, internal, and brought on by a faulty lifestyle…. Careful attention to all aspects of ‘regimen’ or lifestyle, would prevent ‘disease’ (literally ‘dis-ease’) in the first place.”⁸⁵ Yet ultimately these authors find the language of vice and condemnation insufficient, an important point considering that later addiction studies label the early modern period as a strictly moralizing one in its descriptions of drunkenness. Wrestling with the agent behind the lure of drinking, reformers alternate between blaming the drinker and the power of alcohol. Ostensibly the “drunkard” brings this infirmity “upon himself.” Yet equally, in trying to account for the radical changes in a drinker’s condition, these writers turn to language on the overthrow of the subject: what had previously signaled dedicated commitment when directed at God indicates instead a form of slavery when linked to alcohol. As we learn in The odious, despicable, and dreadfull condition of a drunkard, “drunkards” suffer from a “slavish condition,” tied to the “tap-house.”⁸⁶ The language of tyranny and enslavement illuminates the strange condition of drunkenness, in which a subject is both himself and not himself. Arguably “the outcome of weakness or self-indulgence on the part of the paradigmatically ‘free’ agent,” drunkenness resonates in these writings with a condition problematically deemed to be voluntary slavery, the socially and politically stigmatized failure of mastery on the part of an individual. “When a higher faculty of the free self falls subject to a lower faculty, or when the free self as a whole becomes hopelessly enamored of inferior, mundane pursuits,” Mary Nyquist writes, “ethico-spiritual ‘slavery’ is the inevitable result.”⁸⁷ This peculiar notion of slavery’s voluntarism allows the drinker some agency: the addict is not a slave in a political or legal sense, but rather is reflexively attached and ravished by an object or activity of choice, becoming diseased and abused in the process.

In their complex invocations of drunkenness as a disease of body and spirit, these early modern theologians are at the heart of a historical irony: it is the largely religious preachers who explore the empirical connection between habitual drunkenness and a set of disorders linked, today, with alcoholism. Yet in the context of twentieth-century addiction discourse, these writers will be dismissed as ignorant moralizers, as proto-temperance fanatics, and as biased evangelicals, even as their writings anticipate modern medical definitions of addiction far more precisely than the work of their contemporary physicians. Physicians will eventually speak of drunkenness as disease, but not until fifty years after these religious writings. Notably, Dr. Everard Maynwaringe takes up the concern with drunkenness. In his Vita sana & longa the preservation of health and prolongation of life proposed and proved (1669), he writes “that drunkenness is a disease or sickness, will appear in that it hath all the requisites to constitute a disease, and is far distant from a state of health … the eyes do not see well, nor the ears hear well, nor the palate relish, etc. The speech faulters and is imperfect; the stomach perhaps vomites or nauseates; his legs fail … an unwholesome corpulency and … plentitude of body does follow: or a degenerate … and a decayed consumptive constitution … as well as imbecility of the nerves.”⁸⁸ Maynwaringe, like the godly polemicists before him and modern researchers after, links excessive drunkenness to precisely those diseases that continue to be associated today with alcoholism. Indeed, as Jessica Warner has illuminated, these pamphlets directly anticipate the work by the addiction pioneers Trotter and Rush centuries later: “We ultimately owe our own habit of identifying heavy drinkers as addicts and alcoholism as a disease not to physicians but to the clergymen of preindustrial England.”⁸⁹ This is because, she argues, “it is in the religious oratory of Stuart England that we find the key components of the idea that habitual drunkenness constitutes a progressive disease, the chief symptom of which is a loss of control over drinking behavior.”⁹⁰ Yet, as Christopher C. H. Cook has argued, “under the influence of the Enlightenment, the vast interdisciplinary literature that surrounds addiction and alcohol studies has come to exclude theology.”⁹¹

Drinking and Good Fellowship

The embrace of one form of addiction, to God, and the censure of another, to alcohol, creates the appearance of an oppositional logic structuring the conceptions of addictive attachment. But the story of early modern addiction is more complex than mere opposition. For against the puritan concern about addictive drinking as a form of diseased compulsion lies a contemporaneous discourse on drinking as laudable commitment to community and nation. When examined through the ubiquitous early modern conversations on good fellowship, certain aspects of drinking culture—namely, the community ties, friendships, and national allegiances—parallel the devotional addiction to God or love, a point taken up in Chapter 3 of this project. Mark Hailwood’s recent study provides a succinct definition of this capacious category of good fellowship and, in doing so, highlights its links to drinking and to loyalty to community: “It was an activity structured by a number of rituals—toasting, drinking contests, games and gambling, songs—and by a series of behavioural conventions that encouraged liberal spending, heavy but controlled drinking, and the maintenance of a jovial—or ‘merry’—disposition and atmosphere. These rituals and conventions expressed a number of values: courage, self control, loyalty, financial prosperity and independence, a pride in hard work, a bold defiance of dominant gender norms.”⁹²

In sharp contrast to the godly condemnations of diseased drinking, the rituals of good fellowship and its attendant values, including “courage” and “loyalty,” attest to the cultural benefits of drinking culture. Exclusive friendships sustain drinking communities in times of strife. In his poem “Good Fellowship,” for example, Hugh Crompton’s speaker trumpets his dedication to communal drinking:

Fill, fill the glass to the brim,

‘Tis a health unto him

That refuses

To be curb’d, or disturb’d

At the power of the State,

Or the frowns of his fate;

Or that scorneth to bark or to bite at our Muses:

And that never will vary

From the juyce of the Vine, and the cups of Canary.⁹³

The emphasis on exclusive loyalty—one who “never will vary” in his drinking—appears in a range of writings on good fellowship that are structured around those who “refuse” to be daunted in their commitments to each other. Thomas D’Urfey’s “The Good Fellow” offers a similar rallying cry:

A pox on the times,

Let ’em go as they will,

Tho’ the taxes are grown so heavy;

Our hearts are our own,

And shall be so still,

Drink about, my boys, and be merry.⁹⁴

The speaker upholds his unity with his drinking “boys,” who still claim ownership of their loyal “hearts” even in times of political isolation. “To quaffe is fellowship right and good,” writes William Hornby; such drinking fellowship helps “maintain friendship and nourish blood.”⁹⁵ Even the critics of good fellowship recognize its connection to forms of loyalty and devotion. Thus drunkenness goes, William Prynne writes, “under the popular and lovely titles of hospitality, good-fellowship, courtesie, entertainement, joviality, mirth, generosity, liberality, open house keeping, the liberall use of Gods good creatures, friendship, love, kindnesse, good neighbour hood, company-keeping, and the like.”⁹⁶

The language of good fellowship resonates with a model of addiction in urging one’s release into a spirit—the spirit of alcohol—as a sign of loyalty, with the alehouse functioning as an alternate family.⁹⁷ “To consider seventeenth-century drinking,” Adam Smyth writes, is “to consider friendship, community, conviviality.”⁹⁸ Tavern drinking helped establish affiliation and loyalty, often to a community structured around shared gender, class, regional, or political affiliations made evident in drinking habits.⁹⁹ Since one’s choice of alcohol helped to signify one’s class status, drink functioned as a mode of social recognition.¹⁰⁰ Drunkenness, or claims of drunkenness, might serve as a way for the gentry to distance themselves from those impoverished visitors who haunted the alehouse; or drinking could help designate political affiliation, either through the types of beverage consumed or the spaces of consumption.¹⁰¹ Smyth’s collection, A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality, elucidates the range of such sociable drinking, from the English versions of Anacreontic verse studied by Stella Achilleos, to the ballads analyzed by Angela McShane, to the drinking communities illuminated by Michelle O’Callaghan, Marika Keblusek, and Charles C. Ludington. A range of studies of admirable drunkenness also expose the flourishing of carnivalesque ritual and the politics of mirth, both dependent on drinking culture for political and social union.¹⁰²

Despite the seemingly opposed (and equally voluminous) cultural responses to drinking from puritan critics and inspired tavern haunters, both groups share an embrace of the spirit as connection to community and fellowship. Ravishment, be it through transforming God on the one hand or inspired drinking on the other, reshapes the devoted addict.¹⁰³ Indeed, these drinkers of divine and alcoholic spirits wrestle over the claim to good fellowship itself, as the godly attempted to assert their form of pious “good fellowship” in their communities of the faithful. The link of good fellowship to drinking thus provoked particular ire, with puritan critics calling out the deception of secular calls to “good fellowship” that served merely as a synonym for drunkenness. As Henry Crosse claims in Vertues common-wealth (1603): “If we looke into the monstrousnesse of sinne in this age, we may see every abhomination sport it selfe, as though there were no God. Drunkennesse is good fellowship.” Indeed, he warns, one might “carrie the verie badge of good fellowship upon his nose.”¹⁰⁴ As William Perkins asks, in dismay, “Is not drunkennes counted good fellowship”?¹⁰⁵ George Benson also derides the “drunkennesse of good fellowshippe,” while Thomas Cooper condemns how “drunkenesse is counted good fellowshippe.”¹⁰⁶

The oppositions and countercurrents in discourses of drinking help reveal such ideological clashes between the godly and the good fellow as less directly oppositional than fraternal or sororal, two intimately connected, if fractious, impulses. Further, it is precisely in the vexed responses to drunkenness that we see addiction’s range and pliability. Both devotional and compulsive at once, drunkenness provoked the variety of cultural responses that are at stake in early modern addiction and then are buried in later centuries. For even as conversations on excessive habitual drinking increasingly insist on drunkenness as a disease and pathology, they nevertheless retain the notion of addiction as a laudable pastime, a form of good fellowship that proves constant amid cultural changes.

Project Outline

Each of this project’s chapters wrestles with addiction in relation to devotion, compulsion, agency, and authority. To do so each chapter offers a discussion of addiction in a different arena, moving from theology and lexicography to medical writings and puritan polemic to legal tracts and national politics. In the process, rather than concentrate solely on those texts that repeatedly deploy the word “addiction,” I instead select texts that pose the broader philosophical issues at stake in invocations of addiction, drawing particularly on the imaginative richness afforded in the study of literary texts.¹⁰⁷ “While other discourses may be compromised by ambiguity, literature,” Roland Greene writes, “is drawn to it—and can fashion it into something new, granting the premium of fresh perspective to old problems.”¹⁰⁸ Sermons attempt to convert readers; literature, by contrast, serves to “entertain,” both in the sense of offering a pleasurable pastime and in the sense of considering new ways of thinking about familiar issues. Through concentration on a literary text in concert with cultural and political writings, each chapter illuminates an aspect of addiction’s rich possibilities.

When The English Faust Book describes Faustus as “addicted” to study, and when Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus depicts necromantic study as “ravishing,” these texts draw on classical and Renaissance notions of addiction as a beneficial and laudable form of commitment. Tracing the invocations of addiction in classical and theological writings ranging from Cicero and Seneca to Calvin and Perkins, Chapter 1 overturns modern, pathological conceptions of addiction by exposing the concept’s classical and Renaissance meanings. More specifically, the chapter establishes how the influence of Calvin and Calvinist-minded Cambridge divines appears in Doctor Faustus, not just in the drama of election—as has long been argued—but also in the play’s preoccupation with the challenge of commitment. Dedication, the play reveals, paradoxically requires both effort and surrender. If early modern theologians encourage such release, Marlowe illuminates addiction as a process of both wonder and terror.

This project’s second chapter moves from theology to lexicography, and specifically to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, examining addiction through the figure of the devoted lover. In relinquishing self-sovereignty in favor of another, the lover transforms into an addict, an achievement unavailable to other, more self-serving characters. For an embrace of devotional addiction is an embrace of the magic and serendipity of love, a process uncontrolled by human will. Furthermore, this foregoing of control requires dedicated commitment; it is a sustained process of giving oneself repeatedly through time. This mode of loving contrasts with what might appear, to modern readers, to be the more obviously addictive practice in the play: drunkenness. Yet this chapter delineates the difference between addiction and drunkenness precisely through a comparative study of Olivia, Viola, and Toby: Toby is too much himself to allow addictive transformation.

Henry IV stages the complex and contradictory invocation of addiction as both the laudable attachment chronicled in Chapters 1 and 2, and a compulsion, anticipating the modern era. Chapter 3 studies Falstaff as an admirable addict, dedicating himself to Hal. The play’s markedly self-possessed rulers throw his mode of attachment into sharp relief: Hal, like his father before him, rises through the addictive energies of dedicated men only to abandon them. With his addictive relation forestalled and his devotional pursuit failing, Falstaff turns from Hal to the material conditions of their friendship, namely drunken good fellowship. As a result of this shift, the lauded ability to release oneself as an addict appears less dedicated than compelled, resonant with contemporary attacks on drunkenness as disease, examined in this chapter. The very language that designated loyal commitment comes to signify a form of bondage and is used to chronicle the compromised will of the drinker.

The project’s fourth chapter turns from reflexive addictions—those actively chosen and embraced—to imperative addiction, studying Othello’s staging of incapacity through legal debates on responsibility. While Othello’s love for Desdemona represents a form of laudable addiction as he dedicates himself to another, Iago’s polluting attachment results in a transformation of addiction, from Othello’s primary devotion to his new wife to his secondary addiction to his villainous ensign. Prompted to murder by love and loyalty, Othello proves both compelled and free to act. His criminal action, mitigated by incapacity, is anticipated in a much more minor key by Cassio earlier in the play. Read through early modern legal debates on drunken incapacity, Cassio’s actions—like Othello’s—should receive the full force of the law. Shakespeare, however, challenges such strict legal responsibility by staging addiction’s double bind: how can one be both strictly responsible and non compos mentis, or incapacitated? The legal insistence on responsibility even at moments of madness contrasts with Shakespeare’s more nuanced interrogation of addictive possession, in which the addictive propensities of both Cassio and Othello stand as a form of heroism: they open themselves to others and allow themselves to become possessed, in stark contrast to the excessive exercise of the will showcased in Iago.

This project’s fifth and final chapter, rather than analyzing addiction through one exemplary play, instead turns to a single addictive practice: health drinking. This binge-drinking ritual helped to bolster beleaguered communities, as drinkers pledged themselves through expressions of loyalty and faith. Studying this addictive practice through a generic and historical range—surveying drama and poetry over an eighty-year period, from the 1580s through 1660—reveals both the longevity of addiction as devotion and the variability of attitudes toward one addictive practice. Health drinking was initially condemned in the 1580s and 1590s as a deplorable and foreign practice, but by the 1630s it was celebrated for its loyalist potential in uniting politically isolated royalists. Health drinking exposes, then, not simply the range of attitudes toward addiction as a mode of attachment, but divergent responses to one addictive practice that appears at once compulsive and dedicated. The book thus ends with a chapter that, despite its methodological distinction from the rest of the book, condenses many of the paradoxes evident throughout: early modern addiction represents choice and tyranny, devotion and disease.

Each of the project’s chapters takes up, as suggested above, a different arena of addiction discourse. Showing the range of addiction’s reach, each chapter save the last is also rooted in a popular play that deploys addiction discourse in an especially rich and nuanced staging. Most specifically, the plays under discussion dramatize the addict-actor relationship, which is explored in this book’s preface, by simultaneously reinforcing and challenging their connection: Mephastophilis’s power over Faustus, Viola’s over Olivia, Iago’s over Othello, and to a complex and different degree, Hal’s over Falstaff’s. Each of these relations expose the intimate connection—and opposition—of acting to addiction. Through a counterfeiting character who uses theater to his or her own ends—through a character who can claim, with Viola and Iago, “I am not what I am”—the play’s hero transforms. Willing away his or her will, the hero shapes him or herself into an addict, one bound, tied, and obligated to the play’s counterfeiting actor. In devotional relation, this heroic addict proves both sincere and dependent, in contrast to the potentially duplicitous freedom exercised by the counterfeiting actor. Yet this counterfeiter, who deploys deceit over sincerity, is of course played by an actor who is himself—in his own relation to the play’s script—an addict, a figure bound to enact his own role onstage, just as the play’s addict, in his sincerity, is an actor who counterfeits.

Refracting the relation of actor and addict, the plays under discussion defend theater through the resulting dramatic effects: pitting the character of the counterfeit actor against the devoted addict, these plays uphold the addict who, in his or her sincerity and vulnerability, is overcome. The addict, whether in the form of Faustus, Olivia, Falstaff, or Othello, asserts the power of theater to move and transform the audience against the theatrical rival, a condensation of anti-theatrical concerns. In pitting—or even reconciling—the actor and the addict, the counterfeiter and the devotee, these plays draw on the model of addiction to recuperate the theater and produce devotion from the audience, shaping an actor-addict so sincere and dependent upon us that we allow ourselves to be moved.